Jackie Bradley Jr., a defensively gifted outfielder who spent nine of his 11 major league seasons with the Boston Red Sox, has found his first post-playing job.
Bradley will join ESPN as an analyst on Southeastern Conference baseball games, the network announced Thursday.
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“I’m honored to join ESPN and can’t wait to get started covering the game that I love,” Bradley said in a statement. “College baseball has grown a ton since I was at South Carolina, and I hope I can contribute to the sport’s continued growth and popularity through our coverage of the student-athletes who give it their all.”
Following his final season in MLB in 2023 with the Kansas City Royals, Bradley resurfaced last year with the Long Island Ducks of the Atlantic League, an independent minor league team.
He subsequently signed with the New York Mets last July, and appeared in 25 games with their Triple-A affiliate, but was released in September.
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Bradley made one All-Star team, won one Gold Glove Award, and was named Most Valuable Player of the 2018 American League Championship Series, in which the Red Sox defeated the Houston Astros. He won the only World Series ring of his career with Boston that year, when the Red Sox defeated the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2018 World Series.
Bradley retires with 1,182 career regular season games at the MLB level and a .225/.303/.381 slash line. In addition to his tenure in Boston (2013-20, 2022), Bradley played for the Milwaukee Brewers (2021), Toronto Blue Jays (2022) and Royals (2023).
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An accomplished college baseball player at the University of South Carolina, Bradley played on a pair of national championship teams (2010 and 2011). He won the 2010 College World Series Most Outstanding Player Award.
According to ESPN, Bradley will work the SEC Network’s coverage of the SEC Baseball Tournament from Hoover, Ala. (May 20-25). He will also call games from an NCAA Division I Baseball Tournament regional site and will contribute to ESPN’s College World Series programming.
Bradley will debut as a game analyst on the SEC Network alongside play-by-play commentator Tom Hart and analyst Kyle Peterson on May 9 when Tennessee hosts Vanderbilt.
“We are super excited to have Jackie join the college baseball team here at ESPN,” Scott Gustafson, the coordinating producer of ESPN’s college baseball coverage, said in a press release. “He knows what it takes to win at the highest level, having done so at both the collegiate and Major League level, and the fact that he’s done it recently makes him someone the student-athletes we cover can really relate to.”
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